Press releases April 2011http://press.cern/press-releases/2011/04/le-lhc-bat-le-record-du-monde-de-l%E2%80%99intensit%C3%A9-de-faisceau?created=
CERN press office - press releasesenThe AMS detector heads for the International Space Stationhttp://press.cern/press-releases/2011/04/ams-detector-heads-international-space-station
<span class="submitted-by">27 Apr 2011</span>
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<p><strong>Update 16 May 2011:</strong> Shuttle Endeavour launched successfully at 14:56 CEST</p>
<p><strong>Update 10 May 2011:</strong> Shuttle launch delayed - launch now planned 16 May 2011. For further updates follow <a href="http://twitter.com/astroparticle">@astroparticle</a> and <a href="http://twitter.com/AMS_02">@ams_02</a></p>
<p>Geneva 27 April 2011. The AMS particle detector will take off on 29 April 2011 at 21.47 CEST onboard the very last mission of the space Shuttle Endeavour. AMS, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, will then be installed on the International Space Station from where it will explore the Universe for a period of over 10 years. AMS will address some of the most exciting mysteries of modern physics, looking for antimatter and dark matter in space, phenomena that have remained elusive up to now.</p>
<p>In laboratories like CERN<sup><a href="#footnote1">1</a></sup>, physicists observe matter and antimatter behaving in an almost identical way. Each matter particle has an equivalent antiparticle, very similar but with opposite charge. When particles of matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate. Matter and antimatter would have been created in equal amounts at the Big Bang, yet today we live in a Universe apparently made entirely of matter. Does nature have a preference for matter over antimatter? One of the main challenges of AMS will be to address this question by searching for single nuclei of antimatter that would signal the existence of large amounts of antimatter elsewhere in the Universe. To achieve this, AMS will track cosmic rays from outer space with unprecedented sensitivity.</p>
<p><em>“The cosmos is the ultimate laboratory,” </em>said Nobel laureate and AMS Spokesperson Samuel Ting.<em> “From its vantage point in space, AMS will explore such issues as Antimatter, Dark Matter and the origin of Cosmic Rays. However, its most exciting objective is to probe the unknown because whenever new levels of sensitivities are reached in exploring an unchartered realm, exciting and unimagined discoveries may be expected. “ </em></p>
<p>In the same way that telescopes catch the light from the stars to better understand the Universe, AMS is a particle detector that will track incoming charged particles such as protons, electrons and atomic nuclei that constantly bombard our planet. By studying the flux of these cosmic rays with very high precision, AMS will have the sensitivity to identify a single antinucleus among a billion other particles.</p>
<p>“<em>This is a very exciting moment for basic science,”</em> said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “<em>We expect interesting complementarities between AMS and the LHC. They look at similar questions from different angles, giving us parallel ways of addressing some of the Universe’s mysteries.”</em></p>
<p>AMS may also bring an important contribution to the search for the mysterious dark matter that would account for about 25% of the total mass-energy balance of the Universe. In particular, if dark matter is composed of supersymmetric particles, AMS could detect it indirectly by recording an anomaly in the flux of cosmic rays.</p>
<p><em>“Never in the history of science have we been so aware of our ignorance,”</em> said AMS Deputy Spokesperson Roberto Battiston. <em>“Today we know that we do not know anything about what makes up 95% of our Universe”.</em></p>
<p>AMS is a CERN recognized experiment and as such has benefited from CERN’s expertise in integrating large projects, from CERN’s vacuum and magnet groups and from test beam facilities for calibrating the detectors. In addition, the Payload Operation Centre (POC) of AMS will open in June 2011 at CERN, very near to the place where the AMS detector was assembled in clean room facilities. From the POC, physicists will be able to run the AMS detector as well as receive and analyse data arriving from the International Space Station.</p>
<p>AMS is the result of a large international collaboration with a major European participation. It is led by Nobel laureate Samuel Ting and involves about 600 researchers from CERN Member States (Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland) as well as from China, Korea, Mexico, Taiwan, and the United-States.</p>
<h3>Follow the launch of AMS live:</h3>
<p>The launch of AMS can be followed live via webcast at: <a href="http://webcast.cern.ch">http://webcast.cern.ch</a><br />
Questions can be asked during the webcast by sending them to @cern on twitter</p>
<p>The live will also be broadcasted through EBU Eurovision services.<br />
A VNR preview will be broadcasted on 28 April 2011, 10:00 - 10:15 GMT.<br />
More information on <a href="http://www.eurovision.net/">http://www.eurovision.net/</a></p>
<p>Videos are available at: <a href="http://bit.ly/cernamsfootage">http://bit.ly/cernamsfootage</a><br />
Videos are subject to the CDS conditions of use: <a href="http://bit.ly/CDSconditionsofuse">http://bit.ly/CDSconditionsofuse</a></p>
<p>For updates about AMS, follow @astroparticle and @ams_02</p>
<p>Information about AMS can be found at <a href="http://www.ams02.org">www.ams02.org</a></p>
<h3>Contacts:</h3>
<h3>Leaders of AMS in Europe</h3>
<p><strong>Denmark</strong> | Jes Madsen (Aarhus University) | <a href="mailto:jesm@phys.au.dk">jesm@phys.au.dk</a></p>
<p><strong>France</strong> | Sylvie Rosier-Lees (CNRS) | <a href="mailto:rosier@lapp.in2p3.fr">rosier@lapp.in2p3.fr</a> | Mobile: +33 6 33 40 24 48</p>
<p><strong>Finland</strong> | Eino Valtonen (SRL) | <a href="mailto:eikka@utu.fi">eikka@utu.fi</a> | +358 2 333 5644</p>
<p><strong>Germany</strong> | Stefan Schael (RWTH) | <a href="mailto:schael@physik.rwth-aachen.de">schael@physik.rwth-aachen.de</a> | Mobile: +49 173 721 721 2</p>
<p><strong>Italy</strong> | Roberto Battiston (INFN) | <a href="mailto:roberto.battiston@pg.infn.it">roberto.battiston@pg.infn.it</a> | Mobile: +39 366 687 2527</p>
<p><strong>The Netherlands</strong> | Johannes van Es (NLR) | <a href="mailto:jvanes@nlr.nl">jvanes@nlr.nl</a></p>
<p><strong>Portugal</strong> | Fernando Barao (LIP) | <a href="mailto:barao@lip.pt">barao@lip.pt</a> |: +351 21 797 3880</p>
<p><strong>Spain</strong> | Manuel Aguilar (CIEMAT) | <a href="mailto:manuel.aguilar@ciemat.es">manuel.aguilar@ciemat.es</a> | +34 636959701 | +34 91 2466589</p>
<p><strong>Switzerland</strong> | Martin Pohl (UNIGE) | <a href="mailto:martin.pohl@cern.ch">martin.pohl@cern.ch</a> | Mobile: +41 76 487 0405</p>
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Footnote(s) </h3>
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<p>CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a candidate for accession. Israel is an Associate Member in the pre-stage to Membership. India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.</p>
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Wed, 27 Apr 2011 09:00:00 +0000Cian O'Luanaigh105 at http://press.cernLHC sets world record beam intensityhttp://press.cern/press-releases/2011/04/lhc-sets-world-record-beam-intensity
<span class="submitted-by">22 Apr 2011</span>
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<p>Geneva, 22 April 2011. Around midnight this night CERN<sup><a href="#footnote1">1</a></sup>’s Large Hadron Collider set a new world record for beam intensity at a hadron collider when it collided beams with a luminosity of 4.67 × 10<sup>32</sup>cm<sup>-2</sup>s<sup>-1</sup>. This exceeds the previous world record of 4.024 × 10<sup>32</sup>cm<sup>-2</sup>s<sup>-1</sup>, which was set by the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Tevatron collider in 2010, and marks an important milestone in LHC commissioning.</p>
<p><em>“Beam intensity is key to the success of the LHC, so this is a very important step,” </em>said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. <em>“Higher intensity means more data, and more data means greater discovery potential.”</em></p>
<p>Luminosity gives a measure of how many collisions are happening in a particle accelerator: the higher the luminosity, the more particles are likely to collide. When looking for rare processes, this is important. Higgs particles, for example, will be produced very rarely if they exist at all, so for a conclusive discovery or refutation of their existence, a large amount of data is required.</p>
<p>The current LHC run is scheduled to continue to the end of 2012. That will give the experiments time to collect enough data to fully explore the energy range accessible with 3.5 TeV per beam collisions for new physics before preparing the LHC for higher energy running. By the end of the current running period, for example, we should know whether the Higgs boson exists or not.</p>
<p><em>“There’s a great deal of excitement at CERN today,” </em>said CERN’s Director for Research and Scientific Computing, Sergio Bertolucci, <em>“and a tangible feeling that we’re on the threshold of new discovery.”</em></p>
<p>After two weeks of preparing the LHC for this new level of beam intensity, the machine is now moving in to a phase of continuous physics running scheduled to last until the end of the year. There will then be a short technical stop, before physics running resumes for 2012.</p>
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<h3 class="field-label">
Footnote(s) </h3>
<div class="field-footnote footnote-item">
<p>CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a candidate for accession. Israel is an Associate Member in the pre-stage to Membership. India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.</p>
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Fri, 22 Apr 2011 09:00:00 +0000Cian O'Luanaigh107 at http://press.cern